Peter Drucker once famously said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Perhaps the observation is most pertinent for modern business systems where efficiency is defined by your ability to keep your processes transparent, accountable, and aligned to global operational standards.
However, as your business processes grow in complexity, how do you manage them, almost intuitively, to derive maximum efficiency and guarantee compliance?
It is where deep process intelligence comes into play, allowing you to maintain a continuous oversight on your ongoing tasks and activities. It helps you keep a watch on the checks and safeguards, ensuring that your critical processes are functioning as designed.
Process Mining In Procure-to-Pay
For instance, let us consider your typical Procure-to-Pay scenario that has been configured to prevent late payments or premature cash outgos. Accordingly, your P2P process is set to permit a delay of a maximum of three days for upto 15% of your invoices.
But how do you verify that this limit is rigorously pursued with the intended impact on your cash positions?
Here you can ensure this by setting a business rule for the Account Payable process of your process mining platform. The event-based filter will trigger an error message if the ratio of delayed invoices to all the invoices breach the 15% threshold, display a heads up if the ratio is between 2-14%, and prompt process conformance if it is <2%.
Brining your P2P processes under the process mining coverage can reap rich dividends for your business, including:
- Improved visibility and better collaboration between your end-users, procurement, and accounts teams, ensuring timely availability of goods and services and smoother cash flows
- Maximisation of cash discounts and more efficient working capital usage through an optimization of the payment horizons
- Detection of practical automation opportunities along the Procure-to-Pay journey
- Avoidance of dubious suppliers that do not comply with ethical, environmental, or governance standards
- Avoidance of overpayment by investigating the factors that led to disproportionate payments in the past
The insights delivered by process mining are fast becoming a strategic imperative for managing business operations based on evidence rather than assumptions. If you haven’t embraced it already, you are long overdue in realizing the possibilities that process mining holds in making your business efficient and more compliant than ever.